"Backwards" Conditionals in C [duplicate]

Question

I'm looking through some code and I found some strange conditionals, namely:

if (NULL != buf) {...}

I was wondering if there was a particular reason for writing the conditional like this, instead of

if(buf != NULL){...}

I can't see any reason to do it the first way off the top of my head, but I don't think it was a mistake. To me, it seems like they accomplish the same thing, but the second way is way more intuitive. Is there some specific reason to use the first conditional?

Answer 1

Yes, it's called "Yoda conditions". The idea is to not accidentally assign a value when you mean to be doing a check. Most modern compilers should catch it.